Sunday, March 5, 2017

It's time to scale it all back

Maybe it is time to scale things back. There's so much to watch and so little time to watch it. Cinema is in upheaval. We could all benefit.

I read that TV series are producing fewer and fewer episodes per season. They're down to ten episodes for some HBO series. They suggested this was a boon----they could go for quality over quantity and they could produce other series to fill their schedules.

I say they should also make everything shorter.

Look at the '50's. There were all kinds of TV dramas--cops shows, private eye shows, family drama, science fiction, westerns--that were only a half-hour long. And that was in the days before computers and MTV, when people read books and supposedly had longer attention spans.Would The Twilight Zone have been better if they had stretched it out to an hour?

There were fifteen-minute soap operas in those days. You could watch FOUR soap operas in the time it takes to watch one today.

Low budget movies back then were only about an hour long. Some were 55 minutes. They should start making shorter movies again. If movie-goers feel ripped off, bring back double features.

And by the way, have you ever seen a paperback book from the '50's? Most are only 150 pages. When people talk about how many books people read back then, THAT'S WHY!

Think of the miserable souls trying to find work in Hollywood. Think of how much greater their chances for success would be if there were two or three times more shows on TV and twice as many movies.

And even if Hollywood doesn't do it, the zero budget filmmakers should. It's bad enough trying to sit through a REAL movie for an hour and a half. A zero budget feature should aim for about 40 minutes. It would make it so much easier on all involved. Nobody's going to see it in a theater anyway. Even DVD's are vanishing. You don't worry anymore about getting your money's worth when you're watching streaming video.